World News

The Indie Acoustic Project is proud to announce the winners of the IAP's "Best CDs of 2005" Awards. The winners in each of 15 categories were selected from among the 3 finalists in each category. It is the position of the IAP that all of the 45 CDs selected as finalists were in fact the 45 Best CDs of 2005. Accordingly, it was extremely difficult to determine the "winner" for each category, as all of the finalist CDs were outstanding in their own rights. But, since our award process is (loosely) modeled on the Oscar and Grammy Awards, a winner is expected to be chosen. Picking a winner also makes it easier to publicize the musicians: most publications are more likely to make note of 15 CDs winning an award than they are to write an article announcing all 45 finalists.

The process for determining the finalists was difficult enough: the finalists were selected from the ever-growing multitudes of CDs considered for the awards. The quality of the CDs submitted was terrific, leading to the only major problem we faced: because there were far more than 45 excellent CDs (and only 45 finalist slots), many deserving recordings could not be included.

Once again, for everyone who submitted recordings for the awards, thank you for your excellent work and dedication, and for keeping up the excellent quality of independently produced music. It is our hope that these awards will help all indie artists by generating increased awareness of independently produced music from around the world.